8. Exactly, Ma'am

This has been one of my recurring points for a decade here.

If you are paid a salary, you are a worker, selling labor.

If you sell labor, you are a member of the working class, you are not part of the middle class, not part of the strata between the large owners of capital and the workers, not a bourgeois nor a petit bourgeois, not a professional in practice nor a man in trade in a small way or small proprietor --- you are a worker.

The fact is that, above almost anything else, work and people who do work are despised in our society and culture. A great deal of lip service is paid, and lip music played, to the opposite claim, that work is the highest value, but this is a deep, damnable lie. We value the grifter, the speculator, the fellow who finds an end around and gets there easy before the rest, the fellow who can set himself up to take advantage of all the poor slobs who have to go to work for a living, and never has to llft a finger for himself, unless it is to wave the waiter over with another drink....